While it may be somewhat counterintuitive to work a second CRM into your tool stack, I’ve listed three ways below that organizations can benefit from this approach.

Custom Views of Deals in the Pipeline

When it comes to successfully closing the attribution loop between sales and marketing, it is critical to ensure opportunities are associated properly with contacts. Because the lead source is most often stored on the contact record, your teams will end up with a bunch of orphaned opportunity records that can’t be attributed to any particular source or initiative when processes aren’t followed correctly.

So what? Well, lack of revenue attributed to your marketing team’s efforts isn’t going to support your case for a bigger budget or additional resources. In fact, it could result in the opposite of growth.

Marketing has a very clear vested interest in making sure that all opportunities are associated properly with contacts. Fortunately, marketing teams can leverage the HubSpot CRM tool set to keep tabs on orphaned opportunities. By setting up custom views in the Deals dashboard, marketers can get an at-a-glance view of opportunities that need to be associated with the right contact. This way, they can go in and update the record themselves or reach out to the appropriate sales person for the info they need if necessary.

Example criteria to use for this kind of filter:

Number of Contacts is less than “1”

Deal Amount is known

Create Date is after “XX/XX/XXXX” (use this if you’re only concerned with attributing opportunities after a certain date)

Once you determine the right combination of criteria, save the view for easy use and create a recurring reminder for yourself to check in regularly.

Last Activity by Sales as Criteria for an Opportunity Kick-Start Workflow

It’s not uncommon for deals in the pipeline to stall in each of the stages for a variety of reasons. By understanding where in the sales cycle it happens most frequently and why, the marketing team can help sales jump start those stale opportunities with a sequence of targeted nurturing emails.

Before implementing such a workflow, the folks on the marketing team need to have visibility into the pipeline and the sales activity associated with both successful and stalled opportunities. That way, they can establish the type of messaging that resonates with prospects enough to close the deal and inject that into the nurturing sequences they create.

As long as Salesforce activities are set to sync to HubSpot, the marketing team can look inside the HubSpot CRM very easily for this information. Additionally, “Last Activity” can be used as workflow enrollment criteria to trigger the kick start sequence. Additionally, “Last Activity” can be used in the combination workflow enrollment criteria to trigger the kick start sequence.

Prospecting Tool to Help Identifying Ideal Buyers for ABM-type Initiatives

Inside the Sales dashboard of the HubSpot CRM, there is an easy-to-use tool for prospecting. This tool tracks anonymous visitors on your website by company and, although it’s not an exact science, provides the basic details of those companies that you can use to filter through the noise. HubSpot associates the company’s revenue, number of employees, headsquarters location, and other critical details that it can pull for marketers to use to identify interested companies that match the ideal buyer profile.

Supporting sales in their hunting efforts is not only a great way to help the organization meet crucial revenue goals, it’s also a great way to build rapport between the two teams and ensure everybody is working toward the same goals.

Here's an example of what a filtered prospects view might look like:

Power Up Your Tech Stack With Advice from the Experts

It can be tough to figure out where each piece of technology fits best with your processes. If you think your team could benefit from streamlining the flow of your data, we'd be happy to chat through your challenges and objectives to help identify opportunities to improve.

Amanda is a lifelong learner and passionate about all things marketing. She is dedicated to the strategies behind growth promotion, branding and social media. She has spent the last five years refining her marketing skills. She’s a pretty good snowboarder too for someone who learned on the cornfields of Iowa. Amanda is constantly upping everyone’s ability here by implementing innovative ideas, whether it’s a better way to post socially or a better way to track sales qualified leads.